Oh! the inundation of triumphant screenshots: four-by-four arrays of cool-grey bevelled tiles, warming up to rust and cheeky crimson, dawning -- finally! -- victorious in glorious sunshine yellow. If you haven't 2048ed yet, you're nothing in today's world, even should you boast whole hosts of grand post-nominals. Or so it would seem from Facebook. For those who've been passed by by this particular phenomenon, 2048 is an online, single-player, sliding block puzzle game, the aim of which is to collide (and consequently additively combine) matching tiles displaying powers of two until the value 2048 (= 2^11) is reached. It's all the rage. At least, it was a week ago...at the time I start to write it is already on the wane, and by the time I finish (in a few months if my recent rate of composition's anything to go by) we'll doubtless be several new-fangled iterations down the line, our Facebook feeds populated by some hybrid whatsit -- virtual cultivation of exponentially increasing broods of discontented fowls, or something. (That's *so* 2009 you sneer... Well, deal with it. I'm sure that many other things have happened on the Internet in the interim, but one struggles to keep pace at my age, and that was what was going down when I last checked.)
I have played, and even won, the game myself -- with muted enthusiasm. It's not that I don't see the appeal: it's kinda therapeutic; kinda understated; plays gently but effectively on that 'just one more go' reflex. It's simply that, well, I no longer have the stamina I had for obsessive gaming in my younger days. Mind you, I like to think my tastes (and tile arrangements) were somewhat more sophisticated: it was online scrabble that did for me. Weeks and weeks there'd be of sitting up till three or four a.m. before my laptop, in my damp and dark and miserably lonely student room, determined to boost my (already rather healthy) online ranking...just one more game with the right opponent and I'd be over the 1400 mark... And then, when I finally surrendered to slumber, I'd dream in scrabble moves -- and roll up late and three-quarters asleep to my 11a.m. lecture the next day, and immediately begin rearranging the words on the blackboard for maximum points.
I don't honestly remember what happened to cool my fervour. My laptop broke for a while, or the website went down, or something, I guess. Either way, the scrabbling grip was loosed for long enough for me to drift...and now it's hard to imagine returning to its clutches. For starters, I've developed this unfortunate thing where if I'm not asleep by 10 and up by 6 I, erm, well, I don't really know what anymore, because, well, it's been so long since I allowed such an unthinkable thing to occur. But, more disappointingly, I'm all out of practice: I've forgotten the two- and three-letter wordlists (which will have changed since then at any rate), I've lost my Neo-like ability to 'see' the world in mutable arrangements of letters, and my once razor-sharp strategic instincts have dulled to the point where I'd probably sacrifice premium squares for the sake of all manner of three-to-five-letter 12-pointers as long as the words they spelled out were amusing enough.
Still, Stefan Zweig's Chess (a tight, expressive, ingenious novella) struck a 'nostalgic' chord or two when I read it recently. The book features a character who, from rather more bleak and serious instigation (having been confined, for months, in stimulus-free solitude by the Nazi party, and intermittently interrogated for information about the Austrian monarchy) has lived and slept chess moves for months, to the point of immense psychological conflict between the two internal 'players' necessary to sustain a two-sided competition:
From the 'just one more go' at 2048, and my youthful dalliances with online scrabble, to Dr. B's psychological-trauma-induced 'chess poisoning'...seems to me we humans are capable of being, well, of being enslaved, by the most absurd, the most innately harmless, of things -- however much we might like to think of ourselves as 'free'...
I think of all those times that I glanced bleary-eyed at the clock, and then back at the screen...drummed my fingers, pulled a face and hovered guiltily with the cursor before clicking "accept game request". Even at the time, I knew somewhere in my heart that I was not really 'doing what I wanted'. And whilst I might have wriggled out off that particular bind I've tangled myself up in enough others in its place -- many (but not all) of them equally apparently innocuous -- "'All things are lawful for me,' but not all things are helpful. 'All things are lawful for me,' but I will not be dominated by anything." (1 Corinthians 6:12)
Perhaps you've no clue what I'm on about. Perhaps you're far better than me at living intentionally, proactively doing 'what you want', exercising whatever degree of choice you are blessed to have. I hope so. I take some reassurance from Paul's letter to the Romans that I'm not the only one ever to have got myself worked up in such frustrations, though; I take even more reassurance from the 'remedy' he hints towards here (and elaborates on throughout the (sometimes rather overwhelmingly) theologically meaty epistle)...
[1] N.B. I'm not indifferent to the sad and difficult realities of poverty, sickness, politics, and other factors which constrain the choices and freedoms of so many; for me, that makes it all the more important to recognise -- with gratitude -- whatever liberty one does have, and to seek to exercise it in an intentional and impactful way (which I believe can only happen by the grace of God)...
I have played, and even won, the game myself -- with muted enthusiasm. It's not that I don't see the appeal: it's kinda therapeutic; kinda understated; plays gently but effectively on that 'just one more go' reflex. It's simply that, well, I no longer have the stamina I had for obsessive gaming in my younger days. Mind you, I like to think my tastes (and tile arrangements) were somewhat more sophisticated: it was online scrabble that did for me. Weeks and weeks there'd be of sitting up till three or four a.m. before my laptop, in my damp and dark and miserably lonely student room, determined to boost my (already rather healthy) online ranking...just one more game with the right opponent and I'd be over the 1400 mark... And then, when I finally surrendered to slumber, I'd dream in scrabble moves -- and roll up late and three-quarters asleep to my 11a.m. lecture the next day, and immediately begin rearranging the words on the blackboard for maximum points.
I don't honestly remember what happened to cool my fervour. My laptop broke for a while, or the website went down, or something, I guess. Either way, the scrabbling grip was loosed for long enough for me to drift...and now it's hard to imagine returning to its clutches. For starters, I've developed this unfortunate thing where if I'm not asleep by 10 and up by 6 I, erm, well, I don't really know what anymore, because, well, it's been so long since I allowed such an unthinkable thing to occur. But, more disappointingly, I'm all out of practice: I've forgotten the two- and three-letter wordlists (which will have changed since then at any rate), I've lost my Neo-like ability to 'see' the world in mutable arrangements of letters, and my once razor-sharp strategic instincts have dulled to the point where I'd probably sacrifice premium squares for the sake of all manner of three-to-five-letter 12-pointers as long as the words they spelled out were amusing enough.
Still, Stefan Zweig's Chess (a tight, expressive, ingenious novella) struck a 'nostalgic' chord or two when I read it recently. The book features a character who, from rather more bleak and serious instigation (having been confined, for months, in stimulus-free solitude by the Nazi party, and intermittently interrogated for information about the Austrian monarchy) has lived and slept chess moves for months, to the point of immense psychological conflict between the two internal 'players' necessary to sustain a two-sided competition:
"As soon as my White self had made a move, my Black self was feverishly advancing; as soon as a game was over I was challenging myself to the next, because each time one of my chess selves was defeated by the other it wanted its revenge. I shall never be able to say even approximately how many games I played against myself during those last months in my cell, as a result of this insatiable derangement -- perhaps a thousand, perhaps more. It was an obsession against which I had no defence; from morning to night I thought of nothing but bishops and pawns, rooks and kings, a and b and c, checkmate and castling. All my being and feeling drove me to the chequered square. My delight in playing turned to a lust for playing, my lust for playing into a compulsion to play, a mania, a frenetic fury that filled not only my waking hours but also came to invade my sleep. I could think of nothing but chess, I thought only in chess moves and chess problems; sometimes I woke with my forehead perspiring and realized that I must still have been unconsciously playing even as I slept, and when I dreamed of people I did so exclusively in terms of the movements of the bishop, the rook, the knight's leaps forward and back." (Stefan Zweig, Chess, page 57)Free, finally, from his desperate predicament, and on a cruise liner bound away from his home country, Dr. B tentatively agrees to a one-off game with the world champion, who happens to be also on board:
"...I will play only one game...it's to be the final line drawn under an old account, a last goodbye, not a new beginning. I wouldn't want to fall into that frantic passion of chess-playing a second time. I think of it now only with horror, and moreover...moreover, the doctor warned me too, expressly warned me. A man who has once fallen victim to a mania is always at risk, and in a case of chess poisoning, even if you're cured, it's better not to go near a chessboard. So you'll understand...just this one game, as a test for myself, no more." (Stefan Zweig, Chess, page 65)The outcome and consequences of this game, I will leave you to discover for yourselves -- with a vague sense of guilt that perhaps I have dropped too many spoilers already on what is an excellent read (and it's only short! go on!).
From the 'just one more go' at 2048, and my youthful dalliances with online scrabble, to Dr. B's psychological-trauma-induced 'chess poisoning'...seems to me we humans are capable of being, well, of being enslaved, by the most absurd, the most innately harmless, of things -- however much we might like to think of ourselves as 'free'...
So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” They answered him, “We are offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say, ‘You will become free’?” Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin." John 8:31-34)...to which we recoil in horror at the very suggestion of the notion of 'sin' and protest: "Well, we are offspring of free-thinking 20th century postmodernism, and have never been enslaved to anyone"...appending for emphasis: "and especially not to any religion". But how well do we exercise the freedom that we boast? -- how many of our day-to-day or moment-to-moment choices are intentional? How many fulfil whatever criteria our own particular worldview associates with 'good'? What proportion of our time and energy is directed towards building what we understand to be 'better', or developing our characters in the types of traits that we find admirable? Do we do what we want (whatever we think that means), or do we act on instinct and habit and compulsion and resignation and indulgence and just let the current of life take us where it will... [1] As Peter says, in the middle of a rather sobering passage, "whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved." (2 Peter 2:19b)
I think of all those times that I glanced bleary-eyed at the clock, and then back at the screen...drummed my fingers, pulled a face and hovered guiltily with the cursor before clicking "accept game request". Even at the time, I knew somewhere in my heart that I was not really 'doing what I wanted'. And whilst I might have wriggled out off that particular bind I've tangled myself up in enough others in its place -- many (but not all) of them equally apparently innocuous -- "'All things are lawful for me,' but not all things are helpful. 'All things are lawful for me,' but I will not be dominated by anything." (1 Corinthians 6:12)
Perhaps you've no clue what I'm on about. Perhaps you're far better than me at living intentionally, proactively doing 'what you want', exercising whatever degree of choice you are blessed to have. I hope so. I take some reassurance from Paul's letter to the Romans that I'm not the only one ever to have got myself worked up in such frustrations, though; I take even more reassurance from the 'remedy' he hints towards here (and elaborates on throughout the (sometimes rather overwhelmingly) theologically meaty epistle)...
For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. [...] For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. [...] Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Romans 7:15, 19-21, 24-25a)
[1] N.B. I'm not indifferent to the sad and difficult realities of poverty, sickness, politics, and other factors which constrain the choices and freedoms of so many; for me, that makes it all the more important to recognise -- with gratitude -- whatever liberty one does have, and to seek to exercise it in an intentional and impactful way (which I believe can only happen by the grace of God)...
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